Kickstarting Open Innovation

My last post covered Valve Software and the more general topic of “bossless work environments”. Tac Anderson kindly pointed out to me that I didn’t mention the well-known case of the Morning Star Company. This started me thinking: Were Valve, Semco and Morning Star outliers? What was the “Googleable” count of companies who are known […]

On December 30, 1853 a dinner party was held in London that took place inside a life sized model of an Iguanodon created by Benjamin Waterhoue Hawkins and Sir Richard Owens. Today, if many corporate executives and managers were aware of the sea change afoot, they might realize that they too were sitting similarly, encapsulated […]

Back in June I gave a presentation at downtown Orlando as, well, frankly, the warm-up act for Urban Rethink’s panel discussion on Wired for Venture Capital. As a former Silicon Valleyite and startup marketeer in Seattle’s Internet 1.0 (aka 1994-1996) tech scene, it was awesome to meet and hear some of the folks behind Orlando’s […]

Kickstarter, the online crowdfunding site for creative projects, continues to be much in the news. And with the upcoming and highly anticipated U.S. House passage of the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act it only promises to get more so. Having successfully funded over 11,836 projects in 2011 – from innovative mobile apps, video documentaries , to uber […]

You can feel the ground trembling. Is Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site where projects as diverse as artistic efforts, venture and nonprofit causes raise money, about to go Supernova? Maybe it’s the fact Kickstarter has already succeeded in attracting over one million people to pledge more than $100 million since it’s launch in 2009. Maybe it’s […]

In Part 1 of this series, I described how Social Media campaigns and programs may be unwittingly compromised by a villain residing below: The Industrial Age relic of a one-way product design flow. I also reviewed Eric Von Hippel’s recent work on the surprisingly immense number of consumer-innovators in the population, suggesting social media programs […]

Who should read this post: If you regard crowdsourcing customer ideas as a separate and optional evolutionary branch of social media. Who should not read this post: If you’re already exploring or planning to crowdsource customers ideas. Ever notice how we tend to stay safely inside our chosen paradigms? As Frank Beach, the biological psychologist, […]

A few months ago I was asked to do a keynote address on Open Innovation and Branding. So this post is basically about that keynote titled:” Start Innovating Already: A Punk View of 13 Poisons to Open Innovation”. It’s intended for new-comers to the field. There are several mounting market reasons why Open Innovation is […]

(This post is mostly directed to small companies. Larger companies may well find my observations self-evident and part of their best practices. That’s all the more reason why small companies partnering with large firms should take heed.) Whether driven by the new “hyperinnovation economy”, shrinking product lifecycles, increasing competitive pressure from developing nations, it’s clear […]

In an earlier post, I gave a precis of McKinsey’s “And the Winner is…”, a comprehensive study of the $2 Bn incentive-based prize market. I also described the March White House initiative to encourage contests promoting open innovation among federal agencies. Here I continue my summary describing some of the business efficiencies associated with prizes […]